Introduction

Beamer is a LaTeX document class for presentations. rst2beamer
provides a docutils writer that transforms reStructuredText
into Beamer-flavoured LaTeX and provides a command-line script for the
same. Via this script, reStructuredText can therefore be used to prepare slides
and presentations.

Installation

Using pip:

$ pip install --upgrade rst2beamer3k

Beamer dependency

On MacPorts:

$ sudo port install texlive-latex -x11 texlive-fonts-recommended -x11

Usage

rst2beamer should interpret a reasonable subset of reStructuredText and
produce reasonable LaTeX. Not all features of Beamer have been implemented,
just a (large) subset that allows the quick production of good looking slides.
These include:

Overlay lists (i.e. list items that appear point-by-point).

Beamer themes.

Automatic centering and resizing of figures.

Embedded notes and the output of note slides.

Arranging slide contents into columns.

Some examples can be found in the docs/examples directory of the
distribution. In practice, rst2beamer can be used with pdflatex to get PDF
versions of a presentation.

rst2beamer is called:

$ rst2beamer [options] [<source> [<destination>]]

For example:

$ rst2beamer infile.txt outfile.tex

infile.txt contains the reStructuredText and outfile.tex contains the
produced Beamer LaTeX.

It supports the usual docutils and LaTeX writer (rst2latex) options, save
the documentclass option (which is fixed to beamer) and hyperref
options (which are already set in Beamer). It also supports:

--theme=THEME Specify Beamer theme.
--overlaybullets=OVERLAYBULLETS
Overlay bulleted items. Put [<+-| alert@+>] at the
end of \begin{itemize} so that Beamer creats an
overlay for each bulleted item and the presentation
reveals one bullet at a time
--centerfigs=CENTERFIGS
Center figures. All includegraphics statements will
be put inside center environments.
--documentoptions=DOCUMENTOPTIONS
Specify document options. Multiple options can be
given, separated by commas. Default is
"10pt,a4paper".
--shownotes=SHOWNOTES Print embedded notes along with the slides. Possible
arguments include 'false' (don't show), 'only' (show
only notes), 'left', 'right', 'top', 'bottom' (show
in relation to the annotated slide).

Limitations

Earlier versions of rst2beamer did not work with docutils 0.4, seemingly due
to changes in the LaTeX writer. While this has been fixed, most work has been
done with docutils snapshots from version 0.5 and up. In balance, users are
recommended to update docutils.

More recently, changes in the LaTeX writer in docutils 0.6 broke rst2beamer
again. We think all those bugs have been caught.

Not all features of Beamer are supported, and some - that deal with with page
layout or presentation - may never be. Introducing complex syntax to achieve
complex and specific page effects defeats the point of reStructuredText’s
simple and easy-to-write format. If you need a complex presentation, use
PowerPoint or Keynote.

If the content for an individual slide is too large, it will simply overflow
the edges of the slide and disappear. Arguably, this is a sign you should put
less on each slide.

Credits

rst2beamer is developed by Ryan Krauss and
Paul-Michael Agapow. Thanks to those who reported and
helped us track down bugs: Perttu Laurinen, Mike Pennington, James Haggerty
and Dale Hathaway.

History

v0.9, 2015-03-27

Use better defaults. The default theme is now Ilmenau and the
--overlaybullets is now disabled by default.

v0.8.5, 2015-03-07

Respect --language in the context of admonition directives.

v0.8.4, 2014-11-14

Fix width calculation in columns.

v0.8.3, 2014-08-26

Improve scaling.

v0.8.2, 2013-12-01

Enable syntax highlighting by default.

v0.8, 2013-06-04

Added Python 3 support.

v0.6.6, 2009-11-06

Added experimental support for codeblocks, which may be syntax-colored with
Pygments.

Normalised all directive names to beamer- (as opposed to r2b_) in
line with general docutils style, although the old names are still silently
supported.

v0.6.4, 2009-10-22

The parsed-literal environment was losing indentation, and perhaps has been
since docutils 0.4. It now works correctly.

Added “calling” information to examples. Also added bullet example.

v0.6.2, 2009-10-20

It seems there have been some changes in the docutils LaTeX2e writer, which
the Beamer writer is based upon. Hopefully they’ve all been caught.

Corrected url in header of source, as well as some misspellings.

v0.6.1, 2009-09-14

Added note environment

Added manual

v0.6, 2009-09-03

Introduced column environment

v0.5.3, 2009-07-16

Fixed manifest so source included (facepalm)

Changed setup.py to get single-file module to install

v0.5.1, 2009-05-08

Expanded documentation.

v0.5, 2009-05-07

Shift to setuptools distribution with script installation.

v0.3, 2009-03-25

RK takes over. Sections and subsections are supported. Images default to
being centered and having a height of 0.7textheight.

v0.2.1, 2008-08-30

Date approximate. Earlier versions of rst2beamer did not work with docutils
0.4, seemingly due to changes in the LaTeX writer.